As the world has warmed, that warming has triggered many other changes to the Earth’s climate. Changes in extreme weather and climate events, such as heat waves and droughts, are the primary way that most people experience climate change. Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the U.S. has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts.

Heat waves are periods of abnormally hot weather lasting days to weeks. The number of heat waves has been increasing in recent years. This trend has continued in 2011 and 2012, with the number of intense heat waves being almost triple the long-term average. The recent heat waves and droughts in Texas (2011) and the Midwest (2012) set records for highest monthly average temperatures. Analyses show that human-induced climate change has generally increased the probability of heat waves., And prolonged (multi-month) extreme heat has been unprecedented since the start of reliable instrumental records in 1895.

Much more in the NCA link above.

Informed by Data.Driven by the SPIRIT and JESUS’s Example.Promoting the Kingdom of GOD on Earth.

The gummit obviously wants apocalypse to be on its side in passing new regulations that will have no measurable effect on GW, this the latest effort. "Global warming" has lost its lustre. "Climate change" isn't getting the job done. So, let's try "extreme" weather events. Next comes famine, pestilence, war, and death. We just need some colored horses to accompany the reports.

1. This is about politics, namely new job killing regs and satisfying certain constituencies.2. Gummit pours enough money into the GW industry to indirectly control it's products.3. The US output of emissions is meaningless on a global scale and nothing we do will impact the alleged problem.4. Scientists, God love 'em, are no less subject to group think than politicians or clergy.

William Thornton wrote:The gummit obviously wants apocalypse to be on its side in passing new regulations that will have no measurable effect on GW, this the latest effort. "Global warming" has lost its lustre. "Climate change" isn't getting the job done. So, let's try "extreme" weather events. Next comes famine, pestilence, war, and death. We just need some colored horses to accompany the reports.

1. This is about politics, namely new job killing refs and satisfying certain constituencies.2. Gummit pours enough money into the GW industry to indirectly control it's products.3. The US output of emissions is meaningless on a global scale and nothing we do will impact the alleged problem.4. Scientists, God love 'em, are no less subject to group think than politicians or clergy.

What a head-in-the-sand, reactionary (I doubt you even read any of the report or summaries thereof), Flickonian attitude.

Ozone and acid rain regulations worked. GHG regulations can work in the long term when we finally get over the fossil fuel roadblocking (through all means available) to effective ghgs emission control. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades (and oceans for centuries) so ghg regs will take much longer to recover from. Of course we need China and India and the whole world involved and as the report details we are already experiencing the ill effects of climate change.

Speaking of government money misspent - try the $14-52B/year given away to the fossil industry in subsides in the US alone. It is $775B/yearworldwide. This unfriendly source estimates that the US will spend $22B/yearon Global warming research and alternative energy development. Official reports put that funding at $19.8B/year ($10.1B/year in tax cuts/rebates).

What do we get for all this subsidies to the oil, gas, and coal industries? The National Academy of Sciences estimates we spend $120B/year on health related problems associated with burning fossil fuel (half due to coal plants). 20,000 people a year die prematurely but the cost figure does not account for human suffering. Talk about money misspent!

Speaking of famine - even modest growth in temp is not going to help.:We are already at 0.9C= 1.6F atmospheric temperature increase since the industrial era began circa 1880.

Group think is always a possibility - reactionary and immediate putdowns like you have offered (sans any scientific considerations let alone any depth) is a prime example. Scientists study the matter, not just react, and they are by nature independent - denialist scientists (if they could be called that) are the ones being paid by the Koch Brothers, etc. to the tune of $558M/year in “directed” non-science.

Informed by Data.Driven by the SPIRIT and JESUS’s Example.Promoting the Kingdom of GOD on Earth.

You're looking at this wrong, William. What we need is more wind and solar so that we can free up oil for fueling more vehicles. Cheaper gas means more driving at lower costs. That's why we need wind and solar. Our '98 4WD Suburban chews up a gallon in 12-15 miles, so it's quite painful to fill up it's 40 gallon tank before a road trip, although it is nice to be able to make it from Memphis to Roanoke without having to stop for gas.

Today [March 6] the Obama Administration unveiled the Third U.S. National Climate Assessment. This report confirms that climate change is affecting Americans in every region of the U.S. and key sectors of the national economy.

Certain types of extreme weather events with links to climate change have become more frequent and/or intense, including prolonged periods of heat, heavy downpours, and in some regions, floods and droughts. In addition, warming is causing sea level to rise and glaciers and Arctic sea ice to melt, and oceans are becoming more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide. These and other aspects of climate change are disrupting people's lives and damaging some sectors of our economy.

These findings underscore the need for urgent action to combat the threats from climate change, protect American citizens and communities today, and build a healthy, sustainable future for our children and grandchildren.

The report, a key deliverable of President Obama's Climate Action Plan, is the most comprehensive and authoritative scientific report ever generated about climate changes that are happening now in the U.S. and further changes that we can expect to see throughout this century.

It communicates the impacts of climate change according to geographic region of the U.S., and by economic and societal sector-including agriculture, energy, and health. These tailored findings help translate scientific insights into practical, usable knowledge that can help decision-makers and citizens anticipate and prepare for specific climate-change impacts.

The assessment is the result of a three-year analytical effort by a team of over 300 climate scientists and experts, informed by inputs gathered through more than 70 technical workshops and stakeholder listening sessions held across the country. The resulting product was subjected to extensive review by the public and by scientific experts in and out of government. This process of unprecedented rigor and transparency was undertaken to ensure that the findings of this report rest on the firmest possible base of expert judgment.

Keith I admire your long suffering attempts to convince people of what is becoming obvious truth about climate change. I'm afraid Flick and William are beyong convincing. Oklahoma could turn into a desert and Georgia sink to the bottom of the ocean and you'd still convince neither of them that this isn't just some made up political gain. Have you ever thought about giving up on Climate debate on this forum? You have to get frustrated.

Timothy Bonney wrote:Keith I admire your long suffering attempts to convince people of what is becoming obvious truth about climate change. I'm afraid Flick and William are beyong convincing. Oklahoma could turn into a desert and Georgia sink to the bottom of the ocean and you'd still convince neither of them that this isn't just some made up political gain. Have you ever thought about giving up on Climate debate on this forum? You have to get frustrated.

I will be expecting Keith to toss me a life preserver. That would be the Christian thing to do.

OK, BTW, literally was a desert 80 years ago. Flicks parents lived through that. That was a time when mans behavior did affect the climate, albeit in a micro fashion and a time when gummit action I'm concert with citizens was sufficient to correct the problem. Unfortunately, there is no possibility that any change in the behavior of Americans will have the slightest impact on GW..

Timothy Bonney wrote:Keith I admire your long suffering attempts to convince people of what is becoming obvious truth about climate change. I'm afraid Flick and William are beyong convincing. Oklahoma could turn into a desert and Georgia sink to the bottom of the ocean and you'd still convince neither of them that this isn't just some made up political gain. Have you ever thought about giving up on Climate debate on this forum? You have to get frustrated.

I know I will never convince David, William or ET, probably not Ed P either. But I doing my best to bring the latest info to BL at large. I know many of you don't like to wade deep into the technical data, but I do. If no one appreciates it perhaps I should quit that and join the one-liner crowd on this subject. But I doubt that I will- I enjoy looking at the DATA, it's how I think.

BL is a place where I can express my thoughts. Doing so around Huntsville does create a lot of backlash especially around work (and believe me that backlash has been strong at times - job threatening strong). So BL is therapy for me. It creates backlash herein as well but it is away from lashing range and hopefully among friends. I do a lot of study into the important issues before speaking up herein be they religious (inerrancy, judgmentalism, open view), political (campaign finance reform/unequal democracy, 9/11, role of gummint, foreign interventions...), scientific (intelligent design/evolution, global warming), and economics (inequality, Keynesian recovery, econ of GW/CC). I do not usually have the time to put the best case forward, but do the best I can given time constraints and computer graphics ability. I have several books in mind to write when I retire. Right now at work I'm fully engaged.

I also enjoy hearing religious and political offerings from all of you - usually. What I don't like is flippant sarcastic retorts - sans evidence.

Informed by Data.Driven by the SPIRIT and JESUS’s Example.Promoting the Kingdom of GOD on Earth.

William, I take issue with your phrasing in your last post. Man did not change his climate, but just the environment immediately around him. Mismanagement of the land was magnified when the droughts of the '30s came along, but the droughts weren't caused by man...it just penalized him for what was, at the root, land mismanagement, some of it due to government policies that encouraged both the increase in population in that area and an increase in farming. Then add on some slick salesmen trying to make a buck selling land and bad things happened. There still would have been droughts in the '30s....just no dust bowl without digging up prairie grass left and right.

Have you noticed that we’re always at the cusp of a cataclysm yet the deadline to act always moves to a politically convenient not-too-distant future? I guess that when the time to act runs out – it will at some point, right? – we can begin thinking about defunding all these panels and reinvesting in something more productive, such as figuring out how we can adapt to the future.*****“We’re committed to moving forward with those rules,” White House counselor John Podesta said in a bit of an anti-democratic rant the other day. “We’re committed to maintaining the authority and the president’s authority to ensure that the Clean Air Act is fully implemented.” Don’t worry, though. Podesta says this is “actionable science,” so separation of powers and consent of the governed and other trifling concerns are no longer applicable.

But really, after all these years, admitting that executive power is the only way to move (tepidly) forward on climate change policy is basically admitting defeat. Has there ever been a movement that’s spent as much time, energy and treasure and gotten so little in return?

Remember Algore's proclamation back in the '90s that we had only 10 years left to save the planet? Now we have a new spin on that....we're already losing....we just really, really, really, REALLY have to do something or we're all DOOMED!! I wish I could find the longer clip of this bit from Ice Age. Just swap man-made-global-warming for ice age: Doom on you.

Anybody remember the Y2K scare? I bet there were more than 300 experts predicting doom for the world if we didn't spend billions remediating code to handle a little ole date change. Predictions of planes falling from the sky, people stuck on elevators, unusable ATMS. The experts even had some Christians who bought into what the "experts" were saying and were suggesting considering taking out some cash toward the end of 1999 "just in case" the predictions came true. Yet the date came and went with, to my knowledge, nothing of significance happening. A few years later I ran across an article that said the effects of Y2K were largely no different for companies that spent millions of dollars remediating their computer code or upgrading systems than those companies that did little or nothing.

And that was for a prediction by experts from devices actually created by human beings in just the last 30 or 40 years and ones that we could rightfully claim to possess most, if not all, of the knowledge associated with them. The "experts" whiffed....yet we are supposed to believe that a bunch of peons in just barely 150 years of industrialization has become so powerful so as to alter PLANETARY WEATHER and possess a knowledge of all that goes into weather patterns? Gee....and I thought Lucifer was prideful. Methinks mankind thinks a bit too highly of himself.

I won't bother to repost the past doomsday predictions that have been made by "experts" over the last 100 years....and all of them have proven to be wrong. Those past failed predictions are ignored for obvious reasons. If you're batting .000 after 40 or 50 times at bat, don't ask me to believe you'll crank one out of the park the next time you're up.

We already have a test case for Obama’s proposition in California, the state with the most aggressive renewables portfolio standard. A mandated 33 percent of its power must be renewable energy by 2020. According to the Energy Department, residential electricity prices have already spiked 30 percent between 2006 and 2012 (when adjusted for inflation), and studies show that the cost of electricity is likely to jump 47 percent over the next 16 years. Those are real-world costs that every Californian has to divert from health care or groceries or education or investments to pay for artificially inflated energy prices.

Segolene Royal, appointed French energy and environment minister this month, said on Friday she planned to create 100,000 jobs in the next three years with a drive for green growth.

In coming days, Royal will make a joint proposal with the housing minister to provide low-income families financing options for insulation, aiming to renovate 500,000 homes by 2017.

In his election manifesto, President Francois Hollande had promised to better insulate one million homes per year.

Royal also said she was looking for ways to limit electricity price increases and wanted to reform the way tariffs are set.

"I consider that, in the current context, the quasi-automatic increases of power bills are too brutal," she said, adding that her cabinet was studying a new decree to control energy bills in the coming three years.

So the government "collects" money from the taxpayers and/or business and promises to "create" jobs. Instead of Airbus using their money to add an engineer to the team designing the next airframe, government "redistributes" that job from Airbus and gives it so some politically connected wind or solar CEO/snake-oil salesman. Government simply redistributes that job from one part of the economy to another and - viola! - a politician proclaims a job has been "created". Of course, when asked about the job that Airbus didn't create because they didn't have the money the politician took from them to create the "green" job, a blank stare will ensue. Government cannot create jobs. It is a user of resources. ANYTHING it "creates" or that is attributed to it as having created is because it CONSUMED resources in the economy to do it.

In the case above, government then commences to pursue "green" policies that drive up the cost of electricity, necessitating government to hand out money so folks can spend it to insulate their houses in an attempt to negate the increased energy prices of the government 'green' plan.

The only thing "green" about "green energy" is that citizens have to give up their "greenbacks" (aka money) in order to pay for the government-imposed energy policy in order to enrich those connected to the politicians enforcing that policy.

Timothy Bonney wrote:Keith I admire your long suffering attempts to convince people of what is becoming obvious truth about climate change. I'm afraid Flick and William are beyong convincing. Oklahoma could turn into a desert and Georgia sink to the bottom of the ocean and you'd still convince neither of them that this isn't just some made up political gain. Have you ever thought about giving up on Climate debate on this forum? You have to get frustrated.

Well, Timothy, maybe Keith could start with the American Physical Society. From their web site:

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.

Apparently they don't buy into your claim of the "obvious truth about climate change".

William Thornton wrote:Unfortunately, there is no possibility that any change in the behavior of Americans will have the slightest impact on GW..

That's probably accurate to a certain extent, though the rest of the world, including developing countries where there's not much in the way of restriction of the pollution that's causing the problem, is only doing what they've seen us do to generate wealth and prosperity to translate into power and influence. So we can at least set an example of how to resolve the problem.

William Thornton wrote:I don't buy the set-an-example approach. The Chinese and Indians are perfectly able to stop opening one coal fired power plant per week without looking to us.

Sure they are. But we did it, because it was cheap and easy, and because as a culture we value wealth and money above everything else and are willing to sacrifice everything, including integrity and the environment, in pursuing it. So they think, "Why should we pay for what the US wouldn't pay for?" In the long run, they will, but we knew that too. The resistance in this country to doing anything about global warming and climate change is bankrolled by those who would rather profit and poison the future so they can enjoy their fortune now. China and India, and other developing countries, are only imitating what they see.

William Thornton wrote:I don't buy the set-an-example approach. The Chinese and Indians are perfectly able to stop opening one coal fired power plant per week without looking to us.

Sure they are. But we did it, because it was cheap and easy, and because as a culture we value wealth and money above everything else and are willing to sacrifice everything, including integrity and the environment, in pursuing it. So they think, "Why should we pay for what the US wouldn't pay for?" In the long run, they will, but we knew that too. The resistance in this country to doing anything about global warming and climate change is bankrolled by those who would rather profit and poison the future so they can enjoy their fortune now. China and India, and other developing countries, are only imitating what they see.

You don't know the thought processes of the Chinese nor the Indians. The US has, btw, reduced carbon emissions to the levels of the early 1990s. It is a far surer bet that following the GW political agenda will poison the future than doing nothing. The former can be calculated without the mysterious and self fulfilling GW models.

William Thornton wrote:I don't buy the set-an-example approach. The Chinese and Indians are perfectly able to stop opening one coal fired power plant per week without looking to us.

Sure they are. But we did it, because it was cheap and easy, and because as a culture we value wealth and money above everything else and are willing to sacrifice everything, including integrity and the environment, in pursuing it. So they think, "Why should we pay for what the US wouldn't pay for?" In the long run, they will, but we knew that too. The resistance in this country to doing anything about global warming and climate change is bankrolled by those who would rather profit and poison the future so they can enjoy their fortune now. China and India, and other developing countries, are only imitating what they see.

You don't know the thought processes of the Chinese nor the Indians. The US has, btw, reduced carbon emissions to the levels of the early 1990s. It is a far surer bet that following the GW political agenda will poison the future than doing nothing. The former can be calculated without the mysterious and self fulfilling GW models.

Sounds like a page right out of the bought and paid for corporate manual for denial of global warming and climate change. It's less expensive to spend billions on propaganda than it is to clean up the mess. Unless, of course, you can buy Congress and the Supreme Court and get them to make the working class pay for it.

I guess I have a sense of the importance of property. William and ET, I am certain you would not like a de-regulated zoning model to allow someone to build a coal-fired steam plant without any emission stack scrubbers just downwind from your homes. It would certainly devalue whatever you have. Now to ownership--scripture is clear--"The earth is the Lord's." Since I am a tenant on his property, should I think it's alright to pollute, deface, and destroy what isn't mine to begin with?

"God will never be less than He is and does not need to be more" (John Koessler)

Willliam: The US has, btw, reduced carbon emissions to the levels of the early 1990s. It is a far surer bet that following the GW political agenda will poison the future than doing nothing.

William is right to say we (the US) have reduced ghg emisions. They have been dropping slowly since 2005. But they have not dropped to the level of the early 1990’s yet (maybe 1995). The plot below is from the latest EPA inventory up to 2012 (date of document 15 April 2014).

But US ghs emissions have risen 2% in 2013 according to the US Energy Information Administration (unverified yet by the EPA).

Trouble is we need much more reductions to make up for decades of emissions across the world since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

which has left us with skyrocketing ghg levels in the atmosphere

This short video gives you the long view on CO2 in the atmosphere. We simply cannot continue playing with nature that much.

Much of the carbon (CO2, CH4 etc.) is now settling in the ocean causing its heat content to rise according to several researchers:

It has taken many decades to get to the place we are at now; thermal-chemical inertial is great and we will be unable to eliminate all the bad effects already present to varying degrees and will be worse for our offspring. It will take many decades/centuries of controlling our emission rates to those near levels in the early 1800’s to repair the damage. The time to start (aggressively) is past due!